Rahm Emanuel asked about Holder gun slam

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday didn’t deny telling the Justice Department that Attorney General Eric Holder needed to “shut the f—k up” about gun control in 2009.

Emanuel, who was then White House chief of staff, issued the warning to Justice in February after Holder said at a press conference the administration wanted to reinstate the assault weapon ban. The incident is recounted in Daniel Klaidman’s book, “Kill or Capture.”

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“Let me say this,” Emanuel, whose use of profanity is legendary, said on CBS’s “This Morning” when asked about the report. “President [Barack] Obama always stood for getting this done, No. 1. No. 2, I passed the Brady Bill with the assault weapon ban. It is very, very important that we do that. The fact is, in 2009 the president and the entire government was very clear to say this, as the attorney general knows, in getting all the president’s legislation done and working with Congress to do that.”

As an aide to President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Emanuel worked on the Brady crime bill, which included the assault weapon ban. The ban expired in 2004, and calls to reinstate it have multiplied in the days since the massacre of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Pressed further about the message to Holder, Emanuel suggested the White House was more concerned with dealing with other issues in early 2009, when the economy was still in the throes of the Great Recession. He also suggested funding for the Justice Department may have been threatened.

“The president’s record is very, very clear on this,” Emanuel said. “It’s clear when he was a state senator, it was clear when he was also a U.S. senator. It was clear also as president. And he was dealing, as you well know, with a myriad of issues, and he was pushing very hard and making sure also that we had the funding to do everything we needed to do in the Justice Department.”